Many television viewers wish to select, schedule, and record their television viewing opportunities to enhance the television viewing experience. To do this, many select programs for viewing after consulting a paper or electronic programming schedule to determine the programs available during particular time slots. Others change from channel to channel in an attempt to locate desirable programming, with varying degrees of success.
As the number of television channels and television programs continues to increase, allowing viewers to more intelligently select, schedule, and record their viewing opportunities becomes increasingly important. An existing technique for electronically accessing program scheduling information includes periodically downloading scheduling information and, in response to requests from the viewer, providing this scheduling information in raw form to the viewer. Even though such techniques may allow the viewer to display only programs of a particular genre, the viewer must still either inspect listing information for programs individually to make informed channel and program choices or waste time "channel surfing" through the programs that are displayed. Because such techniques do not provide any direct channel tuning assistance, they are inadequate to meet the needs of many viewers. Moreover, prior techniques do not allow the viewer to restrict viewing of particular programs or programs having particular characteristics to certain viewers within the household, such as children, without first inspecting a program schedule to determine broadcast information for the programs, such as air dates, start times, stop times, and channels.
Furthermore, electronic program guide (EPG) displays that consider viewer preference information are subject to error, require the viewer to have some understanding of the particular scoring algorithm used, are confusing to viewers that change from one EPG to another EPG, and do not allow for identification of preferred program clustering, which severely limit the ability to accurately and efficiently plan quality viewing time. In addition, prior techniques for recording programs require viewers to input detailed broadcast information, such as air dates, start times, stop times, and channels, or special program codes to record particular programs, are subject to error if a program to be recorded is longer than usual or expected, is preempted, is rescheduled, is changed from one channel to another channel, or otherwise varies from the expectations of the viewer in any manner, and do not allow viewers to record particular programs or types of programs that the viewers are most likely to enjoy based on viewer preferences or other input information that does not specify broadcast information for the programs. These and other inadequacies make prior techniques unsuitable for many viewers.